


Spy Games

by atria



Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - All Media Types, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-05 22:07:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17333249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atria/pseuds/atria
Summary: 1954. Bill’s in a self-pitying mood; Jim comes by with a different sort of warning. Not as angsty as it sounds (by their standards).





	Spy Games

__ In everyone there sleeps    
A sense of life lived according to love.  
To some it means the difference they could make     
By loving others, but across most it sweeps  
As all they might have done had they been loved.     
That nothing cures.

\-- Philip Larkin

  
  


Two knocks on the door to get his attention, then _da-da da-DA da, DA_! First bar of Mahler’s No. 8, once scratched in ink on Jim Prideaux’s hulking left shoulder while he slept the deep and gentle sleep of giants in Bill Haydon’s poster bed. 

It wasn’t like him to pop by unannounced, these days.

Bill stuffed his papers in the biscuit tin and got up to undo the latch. Before him, Jim filled the doorway. His face and throat looked grimy and his collar frayed, but no sign of slowness or injury that Bill could see. The bald spot at the center of his head seemed a little larger than it was before he had left, the bit of scalp underneath smooth and pink like a dog’s belly. The sight made Bill’s prick twitch and his heart clench.

“Jim-boy,” he said. 

Jim-boy, apparently, was not in the mood to talk. He shouldered his way through the opening Bill left and dropped into the armchair rather than the two-seater, where Bill could’ve rubbed up against his long thigh. 

“You look like the Serbs spat you out from the hellmouth, Prideaux.” 

A bushy eyebrow went up, meaning something like _thank-you, Billy boy_. 

Bill ignored him. “Gin?”

“Drink like the bloody queen, don’t you, Bill,” Jim muttered. At last the creature speaks! He picked up a mug -- thank God Bouncing Bea’s lipstick had rubbed off the rim -- and tipped it in Bill’s direction. 

Bill let the gin slosh out moodily. If Jim wanted to come barging in the middle of the night, he could at least be charming about it, couldn’t he? Wasn’t Bill all wit and verve always for Jim?

Rough fingers straightened his hand on the bottle. “Steady,” Jim said, working Bill’s wrist as though it weighed nothing. He looked amused, his smile at once sharp-toothed and sweet. 

For some reason this riled Bill some more. He drank from Jim’s mug while standing, daring him to protest. Poured too much, didn’t he? 

The liquor pushed through his throat warmly and made it possible to look at Jim without socking him or kissing him on his thin wet lips, which would’ve led to the same thing in the old days. He sat down and decided he would attempt to wait Jim out.

Jim drank once, twice. He cast an eye about the room in a way that made Bill squirm. At last he rapped it out like a magazine. “Heard a story from Wetherby the wrangler after Control let me out. Cambridge don by the name Turing. Forty years of age, a mathematical genius at Bletchley. Pink as a carnation.”

Jim took a long pull of gin, and when he exhaled Bill could smell it in the air. He felt a bit ill. “What, you fancy him?”

Jim continued as though he hadn’t heard. “This Turing brings home a boy from the theatre. Gets back in a few days to find his house burgled by the same boy. Police end up investigating Turing and he’s in the courts and the papers, gets put in hormone therapy, the works. Sprouts -- ah --” he gestured at his chest, a flush on his face. Another drink. 

“And then?”

“Kills himself,” Jim said softly. His dark eyes gleamed in the low light. “Cyanide. Bite of the poisoned apple, as it were.”

Bill’s stomach twisted. He fisted his hand in his pocket and willed himself to be blasé and contrary. “Nice fairytale,” he remarked. “Bit too on-the-nose for us grown-ups, though. You sure his evil stepmother didn’t do it?”

“Damn it, Bill. Don’t be daft.” Jim had snapped out of his trance, his infamous temper showing. 

Good.

Bill leaned back so that his throat worked free of his collar and caught the light from the lamp. He knew from past reception it was how he looked his best. “Jealous, Jimmy? Want me to yourself now?”

It got the reaction he wanted. Jim was up in a flash, one palm hot on Bill’s shoulder and the other at his neck, and for a second Bill really believed he might snap it to one side, let his head twitch and blood ripen in the air. Instead it heated the press and bite of Jim’s mouth and teeth on his, Jim feasting on him like nothing so much as an apple that might stop his heart. Bill gasped back into his open mouth. 

In a moment of despair Bill thought that they were acting as they had when they didn’t know each other. Then Bill was pretty and posh and asking to be roughed up some, and Jim was a doe-eyed brute with rugby hands made for a bit of heavy handling. They had been cynically aware of what they might desire from the other before they slid off in their own directions, water off a duck’s back. But it wasn’t that way, Bill thought urgently. Even though for all intents and purposes it had been exactly how things transpired despite Bill’s orchestration, Jim’s military devotion that he bore with something like shame. 

And then the feeling passed and he was palming Jim’s hard thigh as he’d wanted to since he heard Mahler on his door, the bone in Jim’s improbable Slavic nose branding his neck as he finally bit his collar.

*

Later it occurred to Bill that they had quite overlooked a pressing point.

“What did Wetherby mean, telling you about that Tourin chap?”

“Turing.” Jim lifted his mouth lazily from Bill’s neck, where he was not so much kissing him as holding his mouth open against the skin. It gave Bill the thrill that was harder to shake even when his prick went soft, and so he prised Jim away and leaned up on his elbow. 

One thing for their stablemates to gossip, another entirely for a swotty wrangler to raise it with Jim Prideaux offhand. It meant their secret-keeping and everything it had wrought in their lives was for nought.

“It isn’t what you think. He didn’t tell me,” Jim said, “so much as I listened. Wranglers were having a bit of a heart-to-heart in the breakroom.” 

Bill exhaled. The relief made stars in his eyes. “Jim, you rat. You bad, mad spy. Who the hell raised you?”

“Oh, don’t be modest, Bill dearest. You taught me everything I know.” 

“Shut up.” Bill socked him in the shoulder, but it jarred his fist, and he glared his distaste at Jim whose laughter shook the bed.

“Well, you tried. You and your spy games, remember? You went creeping about in _my tutor’s rooms --”_

“Oh God, he was  _ half-naked _ with his tie in his mouth, I’m telling you that man --”

“And  _ then _ I walk in with that half-arsed essay about Russian poetry. And you convinced poor Rake to pay for our pints in exchange for silence. Born criminal if I ever saw one, William Benedict Haydon the third.” 

Jim smiled placidly at Bill, who smiled in turn, like the old comrades the whole world thought they were.

“Ha! Rake, was it? Had a rake in his pocket, all right,” Bill drawled.

“God.  _ Don’t _ want to think about Rake’s rake.” Jim headbutted him gently in the chest. “All of that to dig up my educational pedigree for Fanshawe, mess that it was. Christ. Why you didn’t think to just bloody ask, I’ll never know.”

Bill felt too fond of Jim at the moment to punch him properly, so he elbowed him in the ribs and left it at that. He felt as full as he did after a good meal. It was difficult to imagine they had ever been mean, or angry, or sad. His eyes were half-shut when Jim spoke again, this time hesitant. 

“Wasn’t trying to rein you in, you know. Not your bloody wife.” He snorted, but it was a bit overdone. He looked down at Bill’s softening waist rather than at his face. “I was thinking more about me, really. You go for girls at least. Work’d be cut out for them if they tried to turn me.” Bill felt his mouth move on his chest, and knew without looking that Jim was making the half-sneer, half-smile that he sometimes saw fit to direct at enemy agents and himself.

It occurred to Bill then that Jim had come to him for comfort. That he became surly and skittish only when he was about to show belly.

“Jim,” he said. “It won’t happen.” He knew how to sound firm like his father, the tyrant in him bred more true than he liked to admit, but the shelter of Bill’s shorter arms and legs around Jim’s neck, Jim’s chest, Jim’s hips and thighs was only learned and learned from Jim himself. Heaven knew who, if anyone, taught Jim. Then Jim snorted and snuffled and likely called him a pompous prick in his head, and the moment was nearly gone. But Bill knew there was a little piece of Jim that believed it too.  And it seemed to Bill that what Jim saw in him was as illusory as shape in an abstract. The thought was always striking him but he always managed to forget, and whenever he was made to remember the dread trembled in him like the bell for an air raid. 

Sometimes he wasn’t sure who came first, Jim or Karla. Often he wished he could have met Jim earlier. They might be different then. But the trouble between them, which in his sterner moments he knew as the trouble within himself, no amount of time could have cured. He could never have known Jim for long enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Alan Turing died June 7, 1954, and the circumstances as recorded by the police are pretty much what’s in this story. In the interest of not spreading fake news (!), new evidence about alternate causes of death: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-18561092


End file.
